Guilt

Courtney Carver from Be More With Less suggests the feeling we call guilt may in fact be discomfort.

What an interesting distinction. I was immediately intrigued.

Guilt is defined as feeling responsible or regretful for a real or perceived offense.

A real or perceived offense.

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If you’re someone like me, you feel almost everything you do and say is some kind of a breach of conduct, especially things like saying no, meeting your own needs, and setting boundaries. This feeling is based on past unhappy/critical/invalidating reactions of others to my actions. If I’ve Failed To Please, I feel guilty. I feel guilty even when I know I’ve done the right thing for myself.

So what if that feeling isn’t guilt at all? What if it’s discomfort?

Changing habits is uncomfortable, no doubt about that. Habits are effortless, especially mental and emotional habits. They feel like our friends. They’ve been with us a long time. We’re attached to them because they’re easy and familiar. Whether or not they’re effective or useful is not the point. How they affect others is of no interest.

They’re easy, and they’re ours.

The thing is, our habits don’t belong to us so much as we belong to them. We can stop them any time, we tell ourselves and everyone else. If we wanted to. But we don’t want to.

So there.

Breaking habits takes intention, focus, and determination. Support helps, but sometimes it’s unavailable.

So, do we feel guilty because we’re making different choices than our habits dictate, or do we feel uncomfortable because we’re making different choices? Making different choices affects those around us, and when things start changing, people get uncomfortable, especially if the change wasn’t their idea. Most people are sure to tell us when we “make” them uncomfortable.

Then the guilt starts.

Maybe discomfort, theirs and/or ours, is a good sign, a sign we’re truly doing the work of change. Maybe the guiltier/more uncomfortable we feel, the more successful we are.

Maybe we shelve the guilt and welcome the discomfort.

Sometimes we all do something we know is wrong and guilt helps us learn and make amends for our choices. Sometimes. Not every day, all day.

Being alive, taking up space, growing, learning, and reclaiming our power and health are not worthy of guilt. Uncomfortable work, yes. An offense, a breach of conduct, a crime, no.

When I feel that old familiar guilt come knocking, I’m going to look at it more closely. Maybe it’s not guilt at all. Maybe it’s just discomfort.

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Skeptical Again

I’m doing it again. Dissenting. Doubting. Questioning the status quo. Looking for new or buried information.

Thinking critically, in other words.

I know unthinking conformity is convenient, but I’ve always been an inconvenient sort of person.

It’s lonely.

This time it’s about diet, and fat, and cholesterol.

I’ve written several posts on this subject before. Here’s the first one.

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I know it’s all wrong to eat meat and animal fat and stay away from plant-based food of any kind, but it solved my health problems.

I’ve had a lot of bad experience with doctors. For much of my life, I’ve been completely intimidated by doctors or anyone else in authority, especially men. I’m not afraid of blood draws and exams, but unable to speak up for myself, ask questions, or dare to Fail To Please in any way. Which means in and out of the office as fast as possible, making no fuss, not speaking except to answer questions succinctly, never disagreeing, and thanking the doctor extravagantly for their time and trouble, even if (especially if) I felt completely unseen, unheard and unsupported.

(Oh, and desperately minimizing any problems I do have so as not to be a whiner or come across as drug- or attention-seeking. Because it’s bad to need help.)

In short, fawning from the beginning of the appointment to the end.

This experience has meant I avoid health care, aside from well-woman exams and an occasional emergency visit for antibiotics or an injury.

When I have been to the doctor for things like chronic pain, insomnia, depression, and anxiety, I’ve been offered medication rather than information. I don’t want to take long-term medication. I want someone to help me understand what the underlying problem is, not slap a band-aid on it. That means I want to exchange information, which takes time, and ask questions. I want to be given resources and options.

Here in Maine I’ve found a health care provider I like and respect. She’s intelligent, personable, and doesn’t make me feel as though I’m nothing but a nuisance. With her help, I’ve caught up on all appropriate scans, screens, and tests. It’s nice to feel empowered to take care of my own health.

However, part of screenings and tests for women my age have to do with identifying risks for cardiovascular disease, and according to current standards of care I am at risk, solely because of my diet and cholesterol panel.

Current guidelines and standards are built on the longstanding lipid hypothesis, which states diets high in animal fats lead to atherosclerosis, which leads to heart disease. Other, equally longstanding evidence-based data from around the world over a span of decades suggests the opposite, not only that cholesterol is not an indicator of heart disease, but it’s actually protective against it, especially for women. Many doctors, Ph.Ds, and biochemists believe the lipid hypothesis is false and based on a severely flawed original study, which means all the current guidelines (diet and nutrition recommendations and pharmacology to reduce cholesterol) and standards of care built upon it are ineffective, at best. This is validated by staggering and rising rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems in the American public since the lipid hypothesis began to change diet and nutrition guidelines, food production, and medical care in the 1950s.

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However, the lipid hypothesis is enormously lucrative for Big Ag, Big Pharma, and food producers, and those entities have frightening wealth and political power, more than enough to successfully stifle any funding for unbiased studies, silence independent scientists researching diet, fat, and cholesterol, and corrupt or bury any data that does not support the lipid hypothesis.

I am not getting my information from Facebook or conspiracy theories. I’ve spent years researching and reading, both in books and online, about diet, fat, and cholesterol. I don’t take the position that current cardiovascular guidelines are wrong, but neither am I convinced they’re right. I don’t know, and I know I don’t know, but the evidence tells me there’s plenty of room for doubt. My experience tells me a high-fat, low-to-no-carb diet is the key to my own health.

I want to have a discussion about it with my healthcare provider. I want to talk about studies. I want to ask questions. I want to be allowed to have doubts and concerns. I want to weigh my overall excellent health and function against numbers that may or may not have much to do with heart disease. I want to share links and be given suggestions for research.

I want to consider the possibility that current standards of care are based on a hypothesis that is incorrect.

I scheduled a phone call to discuss some of my test results. My provider expressed her concern about one particular result and thanked me for an email I had sent her, containing several links and information sources I find useful and interesting.

She was polite. I was polite. But our previously warm and friendly connection had vanished. I don’t believe she read anything I sent. I asked a couple of questions about studies and different ways to assess cholesterol panel results, but she dismissed it all. Flat. Businesslike. Professional.

It was a disappointingly brief conversation. I was clear about what I would and would not do. We came up with a plan. We hung up.

I spent the rest of the day feeling like an extremely anxious, difficult, bad child, waiting for catastrophe because I Failed To Please.

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All healthcare workers are under the gun these days. I work in a hospital myself, and come in for my share of politically-motivated bullshit regarding COVID. Healthcare providers are understandably exhausted, burned out, and defensive. I’m probably just one more patient influenced by some crazy ideology on the web, as far as my provider is concerned. She has a standard of care to adhere to that’s clean, clear, and congruent with the organization’s policies and procedures, which are congruent with the American Heart Association and all the other powerful medical organizations’ guidelines. She doesn’t have the time or energy to debate with patients about vaccines, dietary fat and cholesterol, or anything else.

But what if current cardiovascular preventive care is based on bad data? What if the truth has been buried under politics and capitalism for decades? What if I feel in the best health of my life because I am in the best health of my life, and nothing’s wrong, nothing needs fixing?

I don’t want to suffer from heart disease, cancer, or other health problems any more than anyone else does. I value my good health and work hard to eat right and stay fit. I want to learn about my own metabolism and physiology. I don’t want pharmacological fixes for issues that might not even be real problems.

I feel sad and frustrated and very alone. I’m feel as though I’m being punished for being a sceptic, and researching and thinking for myself. I’m back in the familiar pattern of asking questions and having people shut down, or withdraw and withhold.

I suppose at the end of the day we all wind up with ourselves and the best choices we can make with the information and resources we have. I know what the right thing is to do for myself at this point. I might get new information. Things might change. I might make a mistake, or be wrong, and suffer consequences. I’m prepared for all that. Things change. I can change with them.

This time I’m not blaming myself for the way I feel. This time I’m seriously considering the possibility that I’m not broken, but our healthcare system is. I’ll continue to take responsibility for my own health and well-being. I’ll continue to read and research as new data and studies become available for review. I’ll continue to doubt, dissent, question, and seek information.

I cannot blindly follow an organization, a system, or a set of expectations and rules from anyone. Data can be and is misinterpreted. It can be frankly corrupted by politics and capitalism. Much of what I’ve learned in my life I’ve had to unlearn and replace with something more effective. I’ve never been able to understand why we are so resistant to being wrong. How can we ever learn if we can’t be wrong? How can we ever go forward and build on our experience and observations? How can we ever hope to improve anything?

So here I am, skeptical again, and paying the price for it. But I’m going to stay on my side and continue to support my healthcare choices, even if I can’t find professional support. I’m not going to fawn, or let my fear chose for me, or apologize for who I am. I’m going to exercise my power to say yes and no, think critically, and advocate for myself, regardless of the expectations of others.

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Outsourcing

A week before Christmas, this from Joshua Fields Millburn came to my Inbox. Then, a couple of days later, I read this edgy piece by Tina Lear about erasing our future.

I’ve been thinking about these two pieces of writing as I clean out cupboards, pack, and work on finding a temporary storage unit to help smooth the process of moving house.

To outsource is to obtain something from an outside source. I loved Millburn’s article about outsourcing our happiness because I’ve noticed this, too. We outsource our success. We outsource our sense of style and beauty. We outsource our power in all kinds of ways. We don’t even notice we’re doing it most of the time. What it really amounts to is permanently putting ourselves behind bars.

I had an interaction recently at work that perfectly illustrated outsourcing our power. It was the end of a 10-hour day. I was tired. We were trying to close the pool, which requires several complicated chemical and maintenance tasks. We had some late swimmers we were working around. A woman walked in asking for information about joining. I launched into our well-rehearsed spiel about paperwork, reservations, COVID precautions, and our policies and procedures.

Our population is mostly elderly, and this woman was grey-haired. There’s a lot of information to absorb, and we’re used to people being confused or anxious and needing to ask several questions. We can also anticipate problems with filling out the paperwork correctly, so we show newcomers all the places they’ll need to sign, date, and initial.

She interrupted me abruptly in midflow, saying she was busy and didn’t have time for all this. She didn’t smile. I shut up, handed her the paperwork, and thanked her for coming by. She left and I went back to what I had been doing. I was busy, too.

A half an hour later, on the way home, I realized I was upset. I went back over the interaction to figure out where it had gone wrong. I rarely have interactions like this. I’m usually good with people. Had I said or done something wrong? Had I been impatient or unhelpful or unpleasant in some way?

All at once, I felt as though I’d had a “bad” day at work. I’d screwed it up. It hadn’t gone well.

I had Failed To Please someone. The worst thing that can possibly happen.

I realized, of course, it wasn’t about me. This woman is a stranger. She doesn’t know me well enough to dislike me. I knew I was being oversensitive and I let it go.

She came in a few days later to swim, which means she took her mask off. I recognized her immediately, though she took no notice of me. I watched her as I guarded and noted, once again, how attractive she is. I also noticed how sad she looked. She’s got beautiful bone structure, but she has an air of iron self-control and her face in repose as she enjoyed the warm therapy pool was stoic, her mouth secretive and folded in upon itself. She looks as though she’s suffered in her life, and is determined to bear it with dignity.

It takes one to know one, I thought to myself.

That thirty seconds of interaction with a stranger tilted my whole day. In a moment, I lost my sense of competence and confidence. One interaction erased all the dozens of positive interactions I had and all the things I did right over my 10-hour shift and before.

This is outsourcing our satisfaction and happiness with ourselves and our lives. It puts our power outside us, into the hands of someone else. It doesn’t matter if the someone else is a loved one or stranger.

The second article, by Tina Lear, suggests we consider erasing our stories about the future. She’s coming at it from a minimalist perspective. She realized she was keeping lots of things “in case.” In case collapse comes. In case the power grid fails. In case we suddenly become different people. In case we lose weight. In case things come back into fashion. In case we suddenly love doing something we’ve already tried doing and didn’t love.

This is a big one for me. I always want to be prepared for anything. If I’d had the money and focus, I’d have been a prepper.

I don’t think being prepared is bad. Not at all. In fact, my partner and I are having considerable friction right now around preparing to move. I want to do a little cleaning, a little packing, a little organizing every day. He’s not interested. He won’t be interested until his back is against the wall and then he’ll begin taking action. I can’t work that way. He drives me nuts. He thinks I’m exhausting myself for no reason.

Aren’t relationships fun?

Anyway, Lear is right. When is the future ever what we think it will be? We can’t prepare for all eventualities. (Didn’t I just write something about leaping?) What we can do is be sure we don’t outsource our happiness, our confidence, our sense of self. We can be on our own side. We can validate ourselves and cheer ourselves on when we need it. We can love ourselves, even in the moments when it seems no one else does. Especially in the moments when it seems no one else does.

We can stop scaring ourselves with stories about what might happen in the future and trust we’ll survive and thrive, no matter what does happen, because we haven’t outsourced our happiness, our confidence, or our competence. We may have discarded something we suddenly need, but how serious is that, really? We can buy another. We can borrow it. We can use something else. The sky won’t fall. We’ll figure it out.

Life will go on. Let us be in charge of our own lives rather than outsourcing them to someone else.

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Jailbreak

I’ve been thinking about this post for a couple of weeks. It’s funny how a brief note to myself, frequently glanced at, suddenly grows into a vital, dynamic idea compelling me to weave a net of words and capture it.

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For most of my life I’ve been a compulsive list maker. I had lists of lists and carefully checked items off as I dealt with them. I thought of lists as tools to keep track of things and remember what I needed to do, and that may have been partly true, but an uglier aspect was how useful they were as weapons of self-hatred for not working hard enough, not being productive enough.

After I moved to Maine, I came across the idea of making reverse lists; that is, listing what I did accomplish rather than what I thought I should accomplish. This reduced my ability to schedule shame myself, but my nasty internal critic was never satisfied. No matter how much I’d done, he thought I should have, could have, done more. However, reverse listing allowed me to see more clearly that I actually accomplish quite a lot most days, and that helped me push back against the internal critic. He lost a little power.

Still, my sense of self-worth was entirely tied to production, to doing rather than being.

Over time, my reverse listing became more of a series of short, journal-like notes, part of my daily routine. Now and then I looked back at them to see what day I’d run an errand or made a phone call, but I never stopped to consider the real value of reverse listing.

A few weeks ago, I realized the purpose of reverse listing had become a way to hold myself accountable, to be sure I didn’t slack off or forget everything I have to do to justify my existence. I needed to keep an eye on myself because I’m so lazy and undisciplined. If I don’t watch myself all the time, I won’t do any work at all. The practice was a daily no-confidence vote for myself.

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This is so ridiculous I had to smile. I am many things, but lazy isn’t one of them. And if I do spend a lazy hour sitting in the sun with a good book, who cares? The world doesn’t stop.

I asked myself a daring question: What if I stopped making reverse list journal notes every day? What if I closed that notebook and put it away? What if I adopted an attitude of complete confidence in myself, my value, and my effectiveness, no proof required?

Hey, less clutter on my work table!

Immediately, I felt guilty and a little scared. If I didn’t write down tasks as I did them, where would the evidence justifying my existence be? How would I hold myself accountable, keep an eye on myself, make sure I’m being useful?

Honestly, sometimes the inside of my head appalls me. It’s good no one else is in there.

Along with all these thoughts and feelings was something else. A gleeful, childish feeling of getting away with something big, a sense of freedom.

Jailbreak.

So I closed the notebook and put it in a drawer. I got up the next morning, went through my morning routine, wrote, went to work, swam ¾ of a mile, came home. And the next day. And the next day. I did laundry and cleaned the bathroom. I cooked and fed myself. I swept cat litter off the floor and took the compost out. I paid bills, took walks, and ran errands.

I lived my usual life and not one single authority came knocking at the door demanding to see my reverse list in order to decide if I was allowed to go on taking up space.

Not even me.

Which brings me to the realization that finally brought this post into being.

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I build myself all kinds of jails. Lists were just one. Trying to please others is a jail. Trying to meet expectations is a jail. Trying to understand others when they don’t communicate clearly and give mixed messages can be a jail. Trying itself can be a jail. Ironically, having poor boundaries is a terrible prison that shrinks a little more every day. Shame is solitary confinement. Taking on too much responsibility, arguing with what is, agonizing over things I have no power to change, trying to fix things for other people, are all prisons.

You know what? I’m really, really tired of living in jails of my own construction.

Fortunately, I have keys to all of them.

Now, I know I’ll be back in jail, at least temporarily, because it takes me a minute to realize it’s happening again. It’s such an old pattern.

But I’m not going to put sheets on a cot and live in a prison cell. It just makes everything worse. Whatever the challenges or problems I face, they’re much better dealt with from a place of freedom and power.

I’m a far from perfect woman, but I don’t deserve to be locked up for the rest of my life with the key thrown away.

No more jail. I’m outta there.

Parting

I lost a friend two weeks ago.

I have, of course, been thinking about her. She was a friend from my past, a part of my past. I had not seen her or even spoken with her in some time, but she remained in my memory as part of the place I called my home before I came here to Maine.

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Death. The axis around which our lives pivot, and yet what can we say, or think, or even react with that isn’t entirely banal?

Starting, beginning, changing our surroundings and jobs, meeting friends and lovers, having children, reaching milestones, are all obvious, and loud, and exciting. We look ahead to such experiences, strive and work for them.

We forget that all these involve parting, too. Parting can be so quiet, like a canoe sliding from the land into the early mist on the lake. Hardly a ripple. No fanfare. Just floating soundlessly away into the unknown, while we stand on the shore, watching it disappear.

Sometimes we lie asleep in our beds during the moment of parting, oblivious. We rise, and brush our teeth, and make breakfast, watching the mist burn off the water through our kitchen window, and we realize suddenly someone or something has left us. They’re gone. We didn’t know this was the morning. We didn’t say goodbye. The inescapable moment of parting came and went without us.

Then again, parting can be so subtle we don’t recognize it’s begun. Our gaze is ahead, on the next task, the next goal. But behind us, or off to the side, out of our awareness, the time of parting, long or short, is upon us. The flow of connection has turned to an ebb, and, inexorably, we drift apart from what once moored us.

Someone put my friend on PostHope, an online place for people to schedule visits, write messages, and update on a loved one’s condition. She was unable to communicate herself, but PostHope gave us a place to send our love and support to her and follow her progress.

This was a great gift to me, so far away. I snail mailed a card she will never receive. I posted a message. I read all the updates as they came in, and there was reason for optimism, a possibility for at least partial recovery.

Then, in an idle moment I checked my email and found a message that she had died. I felt all the things we do feel in such moments. Disbelief and denial. Grief. A little later, a sorrowful peacefulness, because she would have been unable to live independently after her illness, and she was a fiercely independent woman.

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What do we leave behind when we are gone? We talk about legacies, and children, and brilliant achievements of art or science or service, but what do ordinary people leave? My friend had no money. She had no children or close family. She lived alone. She was not famous.

In the days after her death, many posted words of sorrow and comfort on PostHope. I did not. Her place is no longer my place, and I am a different woman than the one who left. Many of her friends were strangers to me, or nothing more than names I remember from my time there. My heart is too full, and I was not ready.

I do not want to talk about her. I want to know she is still there, teaching art to children, taking a spin class, working in the art gallery, painting, dancing, and caring for the homeless cats who came far and wide for food, shelter, and love. I want to know she’s giving massages, making her herbal salves, wildcrafting sage for smudge sticks, and cooking.

But she’s gone now. Her house, which was the house in which I raised my sons before she bought it from me, is empty. She’ll never paint another picture or make another jar of salve.

I did not know, the last time I saw her and said good-bye, that it was forever. I still have a picture of that evening, but it’s color on a flat sheet of paper, and unsatisfying.

My memories are better. I still smile when I remember how we danced together, whooping and laughing, and how she tore off her shirt and danced in her sports bra as we gave ourselves to the music and our blood ran swift and hot.

I remember, too, how fascinated I was with her authenticity. She liked to talk. She was loud, and opinionated, and without tact. Her blunt honesty made people around her squirm sometimes. As a lifelong people pleaser, peacemaker, and soft-spoken fawner, she appalled me frequently, but she also amused and amazed me. How could anyone risk being so real? She taught me about living unapologetically true to oneself.

My friend had a big, soft, generous heart. She was a woman who loved and worked tirelessly for the community. That community will be less vital, less challenging, less interesting, and quieter without her.

Death is banal. But life isn’t. Hers was a beautiful life. She gave what she had to give without counting the cost. She loved. She lived without holding anything back. Now we have parted. She’s gone into the mist, beyond my sight.

Good-bye, my dear friend.

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